I grabbed two girlies and a beer that's cold

This is part 2 in my adventures of homebrewing. Click here for Part 1 where Jesse and I bought all our ingredients.

I arrived at Jesse's place at around 1:30 on Saturday afternoon. After a couple quick errands and few slices of

pizza we were ready to brew. Here's a look at all the equipment and ingredients that went into our brew. The big

glass bottle is called a carboy and it's where our two week fermentation will take place. You'll also notice a

thermometer. Controlling heat is extremely important. The six pack of Brooklyn Ale is what we'll be drinking while

we work. According to The Complete Joy of Homebrewing

(Our Bible), drinking while you brew is absolutely essential.

The recipe we're following is a Jesse original, but very much in the tradition of a classic bitter or Pale Ale as

it's more popularly known in the states (think Bass Ale, Brooklyn Ale, Sierra Nevada Ale, etc.). The recipe calls

for:

5.5 lbs Light Dry Malt Extract (DME)
1 lb Crystal Malt
1/2 lb Toasted Briess American 2 Row Brewers Malt
1 oz Fuggle Hops (boil)
1 oz Cascade Hops (boil)
1 oz Cascade Hops (finish)
2 tsp Gypsum
1/4 to 1/2 tsp Irish Moss

Before we can get started though we have to clean and sanitize. This is probably the most critical step in the

brewing process and it's important to note that cleaning and sanitizing are not the same thing. Cleaning is a

straightforward process - soap and water, just like you do in any kitchen. Sanitizing is a whole other ballgame. As

Jesse put's it, "You sanitize to kill the cooties."

"The Cooties" are Jesse's shorthand for germs, wild yeast, and any other micro-organisms that could be present in

the air, on our hands, or any other surface that our brew will touch. We sanitized in a couple different ways.

We sanitized the carboy with a mixture of bleach and water which we let sit for an hour or so to totally kill and

cootie stragglers. The strainer, funnel, thermometers and the rest of our implements, were soaked in a similar bath

inside the white bucket with a special sanitization powder that we bought at the brewshop.

We laid our sanitized equipment carefully out of the way on a covered surface.

While our implements sanitized in preparation for the fermentation process we began preparing our ingredients.

The first step was the barley. We toasted the American Breiss 2 Row Malt Barley for ten minutes to fifteen minutes

at 350 Degrees in the oven. Toasting the barley isn't an essential part of most brewing processes, but it's said to

impart a great effect to the finished brew. As Jesse put it, "We're doing it for style points." The toasted barley

gave off a great aroma that filled the kitchen.

Next we had to crack our toasted barley by pouring it into a plastic bag and then rolling over it gently but

firmly with a wine bottle (we didn't have a rolling pin available). We cracked the Crystal Malt Barley as well, but

did not toast it.

We began our wort (wort is the mixture that will eventually become beer) by filling a large stainless steel pot

up with a gallon and a half of water.

We poured the barley into three cheesecloth socks and dunked into the water where it was allowed to steep as we

raised the temperature to 150 degrees.

You can see here how the cloth sacks filled with our malted barley act like big teabags.

When the barley was done steeping we squeezed as much absorbed water out of the socks as we could to extract the

goodness from the barley At this point the wort looks and smells like a delicious tea.

With the barley bags now out of the wort we added our 5.5 pounds of Light Dry Malt Extract to the wort. The malt

extract is basically the same stuff that was in the malted barley, but way more concentrated. Now our wort is

really cooking.

Next we added our hops. Hops, which come in many different varieties are herbs that are responsible for

imparting the bitterness in beer. You can use concentrated hop pellets, but we've bought whole hops - one ounce of

Cascade hops and one ounce of Fuggle Hops go into the wort.

Also into the wort goes 2 teaspoons of gypsum. I'm not sure what the gypsum does, it's another of Jesse's

flares. Supposedly it's good for the water in the wort. Anyway we pour it in. We bring the wort to a boil and

hold it there for 50 minutes. Now the wort looks like the steaming cauldron that the three witches in Macbeth had

in Macbeth:

As we finish our boil we add our finishing hops (1 ounce of Cascade Hops) and one quarte of a teaspoon of Irish

Moss which will improve the clarity of our final brew.

The next step is to cool our wort. Apparently it's very important to cool the wort quickly before you pitch the

yeast. We need to get our gallon (you might remember we started with a gallon and a half, but a lot of water boiled

off) down to 70-80 degrees. Most home brewers build or buy a wort

chiller like this. Instead, Jesse and I made a bath of ice water in the sink and sunk our covered brewpot

directly into this cold bath. This process made me extremely nervous. While the brewpot was boiling we didn't have

to worry about sanitization, but this stage is where we're most at risk with contamination. Hopefully we got

through it ok, we won't know until we taste our beer.

While we cooled the wort we also prepared our yeast for pitching. We started with sanitation. We boiled some

water with a glass inside it to kill off any cooties.

Yeast is the transforming ingredient in beer. When you pitch it into the wort it feeds on the barley extracts

and transforms the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide or as Jesse puts it, "The yeast fucks like crazy and has a

massive yeast orgy." But the yeast doesn't come out of the foil bag ready to fuck, you have to get it in the

mood.

To ale yeast, water at 120 degrees is like the equivalent of viagra. So we removed the glass from the boiling

water and poured the water into the sanitized glass. We cooled the yeast to 120 and pitched it into the glass.

Some people pitch the yeast while it's in a brew bucket, but it's kind of an extra step and one more chance to

contaminate the wort so we decided to strain the wort directly from the brewpot into the carboy where our

fermentation will take place.

At this point the memory card in the camera filled up. With our attention already split between the brewing and

the ongoing Minessota-Green Bay playoff game we weren't able to sort out downloading the existing pictures and

making room on the card. I'll just have to be more descriptive from here on out, we're almost done with the days

work anyway.

With all the hops strained out of the wort it began to look like real beer in the carboy. We filled the carboy

up with more water, almost to the very top. We siphoned off a sample of the wort and took a measurement of the

sample to determine the specific gravity of the wort using our beer hydrometer. Specific gravity measures is a

measure of thickness relative to pure water. It's useful in brewing for calculating the percentage of alcohol in

the final beer.

The specific gravity of our wort was 1.054 degrees Plato - right in the range for a Pale Ale. This figure is now

referred to as the original gravity. As the wort ferments and the yeast turns the malt extract into alcohol the

specific gravity will decrease. The difference between the gravity after fermentation from that of the original

gravity will be plugged into a chart to determine percentage of alcohol.

When our yeast water cools to the temperature of our wort we pitch the yeast water into the wort and we're done

for the day. We attach a long hose to the top of the carboy and put the carboy into an out of the way closet. As

the wort ferments into beer over the next two weeks foam and spent yeast start blowing out of the tube into a

bucket. Here's our beer doing it's thing in the closet:

The picture above was taken Monday morning with the fermentation going strong. If you remember the begining of

this post (I know, it probably seems ages ago) I said we were brewing a pale ale. And right now you're thinking

"Chrispy, if you think that shit is pale you're on crack." And you're right, it's not really pale, but there are

some things to keep in mind. First of all the picture makes it look darker than it is. Second, it's in a 5 gallon

container, so light has more distance to travel to get through than when you look at a bottle or pint glass full of

beer. Third, there's no light behind it, it's sitting in a closet to protect it from light. Fourth, the yeast is

still doing it's thing, eventually it will blow off or sink to the bottom. Fifth, we're homebrewers cut us some

fucking slack. Seriously we're optimistic that the beer will be a lot lighter in character when we finish with it.

In a couple days Jesse will remove the tube and replace it with a fermentation lock which will allow C02 to

escape, but keep outside air out. It'll make sense when you see it. Then in about two weeks we'll add some priming

sugar to our beer (which will be flat) and bottle it. The priming sugar will reactivate the yeast and the

additional carbon dioxide produced in the reaction will provide our carbonation in the bottle. Two weeks after that

our beer will be ready to drink. Stay tuned for more homebrew adventures.